Accessing a Cultural Experience

June 30th, 2014 No Comments

© Miquel Taverna, CCCB. 2014

It has been 20 years and then some, that the architectural ensemble occupied today by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) was the Casa Provincial de Caritat (Provincial Almshouse), a former charity establishment that functioned as a hospice, created in 1802, and that continued as such until the year 1957. This means that 20 years ago and then some, the walls that surround us today were the scenario for the learning of diverse trades that provided a vulnerable population with skills so that they could produce, create and be capable of earning an independent living.

Since the CCCB first opened its doors with its contemporary and cultural view of the city, it has felt a responsibility to continue offering a space that is accessible to everyone and that offers the possibility of learning through a cultural experience.

The following form part of the social and educational programme of cultural facilities addressing the social sector: Apropa Cultura, which was recently winner of one of the Solidarity Prizes 2014 awarded by the ONCE Foundation in Catalonia. Specifically in the category of public administrations, for its effort of coordination in a programme of these characteristics that promotes the inclusion of all citizens, normalisation, personal autonomy, and accessibility. The CCCB is in this programme offering visits to exhibitions and urban itineraries, as well as visits to the Casa Provincial de la Caritat.

We have become involved in the European project Open All Areas with the museums of the articketBCN group, Audiences Europe Network and six other European organisations with the help of the European Union. A project involving the exchange of experiences based on the organisation by each partner of a day’s workshop with sessions presenting cases from each city. In Barcelona the workshop was held in November 2013, with the presentation of 11 different experiences in all spheres of culture, and with the participation of 110 people, 35 of them from other European countries.

© Miquel Taverna, CCCB. 2014

We are running the special Alzheimer Programme for patients and families who want to share special moments of meeting with memories. In the face of the forecasts that state that by 2050, some 115 million people worldwide will be suffering Alzheimer, how should we as cultural institutions react? What can we contribute? A Soy Cámara programme, broadcast by TVE 2 in 2012 attempted to address this issue and to assess the current state of affairs. In the next academic year, the CCCB will be offering Museums and Alzheimer Sessions.

The growing awareness regarding the functional diversity and cognitive richness of each person, means that many large and small cultural facilities are looking, listening and showing awareness of this population. One of the initiatives that demonstrate this is the Community practice blog on Museums and Accessibility which we have created jointly between the CCCB, Museu Marítim, MACBA, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Fundació Joan Miró, Museu Picasso de Barcelona, Fundació Tàpies, Museus de Sant Cugat and Oficina de Patrimoni de la Diputació de Barcelona; a working group with whom we meet regularly in order to debate and be active with regard to this audience.

We continue offering experiences that allow access to the best cultural programmes.

Colm Tóibín pays tribute to George Orwell

June 25th, 2014 No Comments

Colm Tóibín © Peter Bevan

George Orwell arrived in Barcelona on Boxing Day 1936. He was 33 years old. He came here to fight as a volunteer on the side of the Republic as an anti-fascist militant. He found a revolutionised and revolutionary city where, in his words, “the working class was in the saddle”. He served on the Aragon front with the POUM militias and was shot through the neck by a fascist bullet. In Barcelona, he was a direct witness of the fateful days when a civil war took place within a civil war. Stalinist pressure on the Republic led to the May Days and the city became the setting for a bloody battle between forces that, up to that point, had fought side by side against the common enemy. Orwell witnessed that new Tragic Week where the authoritarian urges of some and the libertarian urges of others opened up an incurable rift in the strategy to win the war and uphold the revolutionary spirit. With the POUM outrageously declared illegal and its leader Andreu Nin tortured and murdered by Soviet agents, Orwell had to escape the persecution against his comrades-in-arms and depart in hiding from a city where he had discovered – and maintained, in spite of everything – a revolutionary and fraternal spirit that forever marked his political stance and the direction of a literary journey that culminated with Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Colm Tóibín arrived in Barcelona in 1975. He was 20 years old. He came to a city that still had the literary echoes of Homage to Catalonia in its head. He found a city that was awaiting the imminent death of the dictator, a society that was effervescent, creative and mobilised, but still under constant surveillance and repressed by a regime that was especially cruel, and aware that it was in its dying moments. In the midst of a dictatorship, the young Tóibín, paradoxically, found an atmosphere of change and an explosion of the much longed-for liberties. The Barcelona of the end of the Franco era and the start of the transition – so radically different to the Catholic and rural society of Ireland – became an initiatic space for Tóibín: a mixture of collective hope for the future and individual liberties that the young Irishman embraced as his own. In Barcelona, Tóibín learned to be who he is and adopted Catalonia as his second homeland. His successful literary career is full of traces of that decisive formative experience.

Now, on the occasion of Orwell Day, Tóibín offers us a re-reading of Homage to Catalonia in an attempt to put into perspective the Barcelona of 1936, – that of a frustrated revolution and a lost war – and that of 1975 – which was beginning the change from a dictatorship to a capitalist democracy. In this transition, the city will play an essential role and will be one of the keys of the configuration of the literary universe of Orwell and of Tóibín himself.

(Català) La gelosia i la seva història

June 17th, 2014 No Comments

(Català) Quin estiu has somiat per als teus fills?

June 11th, 2014 No Comments

The Art of Creating New Readers

June 10th, 2014 No Comments

The literary canon is a compendium of works that overcome the oblivion of time and continue to be read. In the operation of keeping alive books that are not strictly current – by offering them to new readers, who make new interpretations of them – a fundamental role is played by those publishers that are committed to the publication of more or less well-known classics.

Kosmopolis. Programació contínua held a round table with five publishers for whom these classics are essential to the structure of their catalogue. These are the three Catalan publishers Edicions de 1984, Minúscula, and Sajalín, Turkish publisher Metis and Dutch publisher Lebowski. Edicions de 1984 is, together with Metis, the most veteran of them: both have three decades of experience behind them. The first of the two has recovered the works of authors such as Dino Buzzati, Hans Fallada, Kurt Pinthus, Aleksander Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, Lev Tolstoi, Juli Vallmitjana, Eduard Girbal Jaume and, more recently, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner and Alfred Döblin. In the case of Metis, founded in 1982 in Istanbul, it has dedicated a large part of its almost 800 published titles to date to “highbrow literature and critical theory”: in the first section it includes Georges Perec, Marguerite Yourcenar, Henry Bauchau and Bilge Karasu; in the second, it has published works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Emile Cioran and Sigmund Freud.

Minúscula, which in 2015 celebrated 15 years in the publishing business, has, from its first two titles – by Joseph Roth and Marisa Madieri – built up a catalogue that, in the words of its publisher, Valeria Bergalli, has “a marked interest in European culture, in an artistic heritage that has never known frontiers and in writers that, at decisive moments, deciphered the signs of the times with extraordinary sensitivity”. Thus, it has opted for authors such as Varlam Shalámov, Giani Stuparich, Gertrude Stein, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Hans Keilson, Svetislav Basara, Pierre Bergounioux, Rachel Bespaloff and Shirley Jackson. Coinciding with its tenth anniversary, it launched a collection in Catalan, in which it has published Anton Chekhov, Dacia Maraini and Ferdinando Camon, among other authors.

In the case of the Dutch publisher Lebowski, it combines the publication of contemporary Dutch authors with classics such as Natsume Sooseki, Gaito Gazdanov, Erich Kästner and Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager and established 20th century names in American letters such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski.

Sajalín is, of the five publishers that were present at the round table, the youngest of all. Its mission is very clear: “to publish in Spanish unpublished or forgotten works of the best contemporary foreign narrative”. In just five years, it has enabled its readers to discover the work of Edward Bunker, Seumas O’Kelly, Osamu Dazai, Kenneth Cook, Edlef Köppen, Beppe Fenoglio and Luigi Bartolini. It has recently incorporated novels by Waguih Ghali and Dambudzo Marechera.

The “Unknown Classics” round table was part of the Schwob project, which aims to make better known around Europe some forty books of high literary quality that have rarely been translated, including titles by Miklós Banffy, Tibor Déry, Kees Bordewijk, Víctor Català and Álvaro Cunqueiro. The session was followed by a second debate focused on writers who have started to open up a pathway recently. This is the case of Marina Espasa, Yannick Garcia, Jenn Díaz and David Gálvez. Espasa made her debut in 2012 with the novel La dona que es va perdre (Empúries), and publisedh her second book, El dia del cérvol (L’Altra) on 2015. Garcia, who became known with De dalt i de baix (Edicions 62), a book of poems that won the Gabriel Ferrater Prize in 2003, has returned after a parenthesis of nearly a decade with the collections of short stories Barbamecs (Cossetània, 2012) and La nostra vida vertical (L’Altra, 2014): the latter having won the Documenta Prize. Jenn Díaz is the youngest of the four authors – she is only 28 years old and, surprisingly, she is also the most published: Mare i filla (Amsterdam, 2015) is already her fifth novel, the first written in Catalan. Meanwhile Gálvez, born in Vilanova i la Geltrú but resident in Andorra, presented a first singular and very daring novel, Cartes mortes (Males Herbes), and has recentry published Res no és real (Males Herbes).

Watch the debate in this video.

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